Epigenetics and the New Politics of Heredity

Maurizio Meloni, sociologist at the University of Sheffield and co-editor of the recent Sociological Review Monograph Biosocial Matters (2016), studies the social life of the biological theories of “heredity.” At the crossroads of social studies of science and history of ideas, his book Political Biology analyzes the rise and fall of the “modern” paradigm of heredity, i.e. the notion that “hereditary material is fixed once and for all at conception and unaffected by changes in the environment or phenotype of the parents” [1]—and its sociopolitical implications. The book’s structure is mainly a chronological one. Its general principle is presented in the first chapter—Political Biology and the Politics of Epistemology—which serves both as a general introduction and as a theoretical manifesto. Meloni distinguishes mainly between three successive “biological eras,” “each involving specific articulations of the relationship between biology and politics and each separated by more or less visible caesuras” [25]. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with the first era—the first half of the 20 century. The two following chapters (5 and 6) focus on the second era, from 1945 to the 1990s. Chapter 7 and most of the concluding chapter (chapter 8) discuss the most recent period, the life sciences postgenomic “revolution” starting with the 21 century. The notion of “political biology” requires some clarification. Defined as the “application of political epistemology to the history of biology” [13], it invites the reader to follow a general rule of “triangulation”. The development and social uses of the theories of heredity should be analyzed as the outcome of a “negotiation” between three main “poles” or “forces”: rhetorics (or knowledge claims), science, and politics. “Knowledge claims pass through an intense negotiation with the other two components of the political epistemological triangle: the constraints imposed by acceptable [.] 1 Meloni M., Williams S., Martin P., eds, 2016, Biosocial Matters: Rethinking the Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century, Wiley-Blackwell/The Sociological Review.